Chey Tae-won to Start Honam Semiconductor Construction Despite Delays - 조선일보

Chey Tae-won's decision to greenlight Honam Semiconductor construction despite prior slippage is not a schedule rescue—it is a strategic land grab in the HBM arms race. On the technical stack, the Honam line will directly expand HBM3E and HBM4 wafer output. Upstream, ASML's EUV delivery cadence and 12-inch silicon wafer allocations from SUMCO and Shin-Etsu will be repriced by this incremental demand. Downstream, the HBM stacking bottleneck constraining NVIDIA's GB300 and AMD's MI400 should see meaningful relief by H2 2026. On compliance, BIS export controls on advanced packaging equipment continue to tighten. If Honam incorporates 2.5D advanced packaging, the equipment procurement window is closing fast; SK must lock in critical lithography and bonding tools within 2025. Uncertainty around HBM export licenses to China forces the fab's customer mix to tilt toward North American and European AI data centers. Competitively, Samsung's P4/P5 lines are accelerating HBM4 ramp, and Micron is adding capacity in Idaho. A further six-month slip at Honam could compress SK Hynix's share of NVIDIA's HBM supply from above 60% to below 50%, destabilizing its valuation anchor. 12-to-24-month outlook: HBM transitions from seller's market to structural tight balance, but exponential demand from AI inference chips means genuine oversupply is unlikely before 2027. Honam is SK's last card to lock in the next AI cycle's pricing power.